Flipboard, the "personalized social magazine" app for reading Twitter and Facebook on the iPad, announced a deal with eight online publishers that will allow those publishers' stories to appear directly within the Flipboard app with custom typography, layout and imagery.

A story from SF Gate appearing directly in Flipboard.
Flipboard's Mike McCue announced the experiment Thursday in a letter to readers on the app and at the company's Web site. Selected articles from the eight publishers will include a “Read Article” button—similar in appearance and placement to the “Read on Web” button Flipboard users usually see with links—that will take users to specially formatted pages “which will load sig­nif­i­cantly faster and look absolutely gorgeous."

“Please keep in mind though that this is still a test,” McCue told readers, “so you will likely see for­matting bugs here and there which will get better over time.” Indeed, some articles available under the experiment Thursday afternoon did have some formatting issues, including awkward page-breaks apparently meant for their original Web versions. But those offerings also included full-page magazine-style advertisements. (Presumably Flipboard is sharing the revenue of those advertisements with the publishers as a part of the deal.)